Read to your childrenTwenty minutes a day;You have the time,And so do they.Read while the laundry is in the machine;Read while the dinner cooks;Tuck a child in the crook of your armAnd reach for the l...
If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.
Nobody but a reader becomes a writer.
Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.
A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.
I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.
Grandma, how old is she?Oh I don't know. Grandma said. You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.
So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.
I don’t think grandma’s a very good influence on us.
This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.
The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.
We write by the light of every story we have ever read.
She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.
But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.
That's the way people is who ain't goin' anyplace in life theirselves. They don't want you goin' anyplace either.
I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;I read not for happy endings but for new be...
And I'll tell you something else for free. If you set a foot over that doorsill, I'll wring your red neck.
Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago.